Paul Andrews | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Paul Andrews is the man with the vision behind The Crossing neighborhood development in Buena Vista, Colo. He talks with Adam Williams about that project, which is committed to 50 percent affordable housing through partnerships with the Chaffee Housing Trust and Chaffee Housing Authority.
Paul and Adam also go back to Paul’s roots in small-town England, where he says he grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks.” Through his father, Paul formed a lifelong connection with nature and an ambition to build a life that was beyond expectations.
Paul also tells of his first big adventure to America, where things went very wrong on day one and by day two his life would be profoundly changed forever. Among other things.
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SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Paul Andrews & The Crossing
Website: thecrossingbv.com
Instagram: @thecrossingbv
Facebook: /The-Crossing-BV/61562068070888
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-crossing-bv
We Are Chaffee Podcast
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
We Are Chaffee Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
We Are Chaffee Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:00:13): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today I’m talking with Paul Andrews. Some of you will know Paul as the man with the vision for developing The Crossing in BV. So we do talk about that, of course, the how, and the why, and the what of all of that. The Crossing is dedicating 50% of its forthcoming neighborhood development to affordable housing. It’s doing that in partnership with the Chaffee Housing Authority and the Chaffee Housing Trust.
(00:00:44): But Paul and I go much deeper into his story, his personal story, back to his roots in small town England where he says he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, but through his father, formed a lifelong connection with nature and an ambition to build a life that was beyond expectations. Paul and I talk about his first job, at eight years old, in a joinery shop and his saving money for years to take the adventure of a lifetime to America, something he’d only read about in magazines.
(00:01:13): Right out of the gate, it all goes very wrong. Then, just as suddenly, it goes incredibly and romantically very right. It changes Paul’s life in the most profound of ways, forever. We also talk about his introduction to the Mankind Project several years ago and how that too has changed his life. Once a career go-getter who is consumed with making up for the life his father did not have, Paul now speaks of the Enneagram and the warrior archetype, faith in the universe, and the zen of housing development. So we talk about all that too, among other things.
(00:01:49): The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health. Go to wearechaffeepod.com to see show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation. You can subscribe to the monthly email newsletter there as well, and you can see more photos and support the podcast on Instagram at wearechaffeepod.
Now, here is Paul Andrews.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:02:19): You grew up in small-town England, and I’m really interested in knowing where was that? When we say small, how might you define that if it’s population or in some other way, and overall just what was it like to live there? What were your early years in childhood like growing up in that place?
Paul Andrews (00:02:34): Yeah, thanks Adam. Good morning. I grew up in a small town called Woodley. It’s maybe twice as many people in it as Buena Vista. It’s about 50 miles west of London is how I describe it. It was a working-class neighborhood. I had two loving parents. My mum was the administrator in a woodworking joinery company. My dad had a series of jobs that he worked through, and in last years of his life, he was a taxi driver. And yeah, he passed when I was 23 years old. He was only 59, year or two older than I am today. And his life and attitude really had a big influence on me and the course of my life, and something that I’m only really coming to consider more recently is I have time to reflect back on how I got to this place and to be doing what I’m doing. He grew up before the war. His dad died when he was 18 months old.
Adam Williams (00:03:52): In the war?
Paul Andrews (00:03:53): No, he actually died of a wound from the first world war that continued to fester with him. And he died in ’36, when my dad was a couple of years, not even two years old. My mum, they were living in Brixton, in London, and she was working a number of jobs in different cafes and restaurants. And the papers I’ve seen, because he never told me all these stories, say that she left him in the care of others. And so grandfather who was in the church took him out of that life and he ended up in a children’s home in northern England. So he grew up in an institution and he did well in school. You can see he was smart, but he just grew this self-confidence, this beauty and a deep love of nature.
(00:04:57): He didn’t tell me much about these early days other than, yeah, I grew up in this children’s home and it was cool, and I had these friends and we used to climb trees and run in the woods. And you could tell, as I’ve gone back after his death and looked through reports and documents and sort of tracked back through that history, that there was a time where there was some lack of self-confidence in there, where he never really fulfilled some of those potentials.
And not completing those potentials that I saw in him when I looked back, has definitely had an influence on my life. I spent a lot of time working hard, trying to achieve, do things. And with a little more reflection it feels like a lot of that was making up for this father wound and being able to achieve stuff and do stuff, and take advantage of the opportunities that I’ve been given because of the way he and my mother set me up in life, that he never really had the chance to fulfill.
Adam Williams (00:06:08): Do you feel like you’re trying to accomplish on his behalf?
Paul Andrews (00:06:11): I feel like I was, and that drove me to work incredibly hard in corporate America and do this job and try and be better than and make up for growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in England. In the last five, six, eight years, I’ve been able to get some perspective on that to slow down, to maybe be a little bit more than do, and I attribute a lot of that drive that I had to really try and make up for what he was unable to do. Yeah, so to a father wound.
Adam Williams (00:06:50): He died at 59. You obviously made the connection to where you are in your age at this point. It seems like there’s something there you’re reflecting on as well, and I’m wondering how that impacts you as you approach the age that he was.
Paul Andrews (00:07:04): Yeah, I’m a math guy and a counter, so I know the date when I work out exactly how old he was when I will be the age that he passed. I’m not as present to what that will look like in the future. I think a lot of this reflection has really just come up in the last six or seven years as I’ve entered the second half of my life and I have not been as driven. I’ve had the opportunity and the luxury to slow down and make more deliberate decisions about what I want to do with the next 35, 40 years of my life, and to bravely look at what makes me happy. What’s that truth?
Adam Williams (00:07:55): Was there a particular experience, those several years ago, or anything that you might attribute to when this change in yourself started and you started thinking about yourself and your life and connecting it to your father’s story and those things? What was maybe the impetus for this new perspective?
Paul Andrews (00:08:14): Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. One is there’s a true connection to nature that my dad passed on to me and that’s really been a north star in my life. We used to hike and walk through the countryside in England, and it was the one time when I was with him that I knew he was completely at peace and he passed that on to me. So I took that and I remember a school trip when I was 10 or 11, and it was the first time I’d been out of southern England and we were in the Pennines, we were hiking through the peat bogs of northern England. It was raining, it was misty. We were probably totally lost. Everybody was miserable, mad, what are we doing here? And I absolutely will remember standing, not being able to see more than 20 feet out.
(00:09:21): I’m up to my ankles, knees in mud and we’re cold and wet, and this beautiful feeling went through me and I’m like, “This is where I want to be. I want to be in the mountains. I feel this peace here.” And so I followed that to college. I went to the north of England to be closer to those mountains and it was a big move for someone in our family to go to college. It didn’t happen much from the school and from Woodley. So I fell at home in those mountains and then as soon as I graduated, two days later, a friend and myself were on a plane to Boulder, to go rock climbing, to follow bigger mountains.
Adam Williams (00:10:02): To Boulder, Colorado?
Paul Andrews (00:10:03): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:10:03): From England, right after graduating college?
Paul Andrews (00:10:06): Two days. Yeah, first time either of us had been on a plane. We’d just seen these magazines and there were these amazing climbs in Boulder Canyon, and the Desert, and Smith Rock, and Yosemite, and it’s like, wow, we can do this. We saved up a little bit of money and that was… The universe delivered some surprises in the first week of that trip too.
Adam Williams (00:10:31): How did you save money? What were you doing at that time to be able to put away some money and make this big adventure?
Paul Andrews (00:10:37): The joinery shop that my mom worked in, I started working up there when I was about eight. They’d made staircases and window frames.
Adam Williams (00:10:47): You started working when you were eight?
Paul Andrews (00:10:49): It was part-time, Fridays and weekends. They wouldn’t let me use the machinery, but I got to clean the kitchen, clean the toilets and clean the office. And then I was able to clean the machines. It sounds a little Dickensian, but it was really good people, and by the time I’m 12 or 13, on Friday nights and Saturdays, I was helping the guys put together staircases and window frames, and that was my job throughout high school.
We’d go up to London in the summers and renovate houses, so I saved some money there. My mum was also incredibly frugal. She grew up, she was five, six years older than my dad, but she was born in ’39, so the first six years of her life was… Her dad was away in the second world war. And she grew up home alone with my mum, and there was no food in the grocery store. They grew everything in the backyard. And there were bombs.
(00:12:05): I look at what’s happening in Ukraine today and they were not living in a place that war-strewn, but I think if you ask most people today, you’d say that Putin’s not going to take over the entire world, but back then when Hitler was invading England and he’d successfully taken over a bunch of other countries, there was a lot of uncertainty there for the first five or six years of my mum’s life. And so she had a beautiful attitude. A “It can’t be worse than that,” attitude, but a frugality that she grew up with with her mum. And so if we got money or gifts for our birthdays or at Christmas, we’d save half of it, and that’s really how we put together a couple of thousand dollars to be able to come over here and debag our way around all the greatest climbing places in America, around $4 a day. It was pretty cool.
Adam Williams (00:13:04): I’m still having this visual, this Dickensian, as you said, visual of you as a child, because I’m also thinking back in this country, early on before there were child labor laws, we would have kids that were like five and six and seven years old who were working in canneries and things, but I would’ve thought that was such a time in the past. You’re not that much older than me. You’re actually the age of my brother.
So I feel like we’re very within reach here, and that still just surprises me. But that work ethic and that saving obviously is a lasting imprint from your mother and probably both your parents, I assume actually, and how to carry forward in your life and make dreams like this happen where you come to Boulder, you do that first trip. You said in the first week there were, I don’t know, surprises, some kind of exciting things happening. Is there anything there to reflect on before we go deeper in some other direction?
Paul Andrews (00:13:57): Sure. Yeah. No, it’s just because it’s a theme that comes up again. The universe delivers something bad and tough, but it happens for a reason. The first day we hiked up Boulder Canyon, we climbed on this amazing route that we’d read about and the sun’s shining. We come back down to the base of the climbing route and we go to make our cup of tea, and our backpacks that had everything in it that we… Climbing gear is not cheap for a student. We spent our entire lives accumulating what we had here. Someone had stolen all our stuff. Everything that we’d brought to America was stolen that very first day. And so passports, traveler’s checks we had back in those days.
Adam Williams (00:14:52): Oh, wow.
Paul Andrews (00:14:52): All our clothes, climbing gear. So we walk back down, we spend the first night in the police station, and then they say, well, you could probably stay at the youth hostel. So then it flips, we go into this youth hostel and every single person we met said, I can’t believe that happened to you on the first day in our country. Here’s a T-shirt. Here’s a pair of shoes. I don’t need all of this. The youth hostel guy says, “Well, you obviously have no money now, but if you can help paint these radiators, you don’t need to pay me for the first month.” And within a month we have more clothes, more climbing gear, more friends than when we arrived.
(00:15:40): But then also manifestly, that second day, I meet my wife. She’s in the youth hostel trying to make stuff work in Colorado, and we connect deeply. The second night we go to an amazing show at Red Rocks and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Taj Mahal and B.B. King, and there’s this kid from England staring at The Rocks in one of the greatest concert arenas on the planet, and two days after that we decided to get married. And so yeah, five days in the States, four days into meeting this woman, it felt right. And none of that would’ve happened if the universe doesn’t deliver this blow of all your stuff getting stolen.
Adam Williams (00:16:38): I’m speechless. I’m speechless. This is such an incredible story and adventure. Did you ever return to England? And I don’t mean, did you ever visit, I mean, was life here from then on?
Paul Andrews (00:16:52): It was in my heart. Yeah. I always wanted to be in Colorado. It felt right in the same way when I stood in that peat bog in northern England, I’m in the flat irons. I’m smelling pine trees, I’m climbing, I’m biking. I’m like, this is where I’m going to be. And now it feels like that in BV, but that’s a little later in the story.
(00:17:18): So yeah, we debagged, we climbed our cap. We spent a month in Joshua Tree. We’re just living our best lives climbing every day, and then your visa runs out. I go back, Ciel and I work through the fact that we really do want to be together, and so I came back. I spent four months applying for jobs in Virginia where my wife was from. I’ve got this fancy physics degree from Manchester University, which is super revered in England, and I’d worked my butt off to get decent grades, and so I’m like, hey, of course there’s plenty of jobs out there.
20 or 30 applications in, there are two boxes on most job application forms. Do you have a green card? Do you have US citizenship? And I’m like, no, I don’t have either of those, but I have this physics degree and I’m willing to work hard. Not a single interview. So after four months of doing that, whacking weeds and moving boulders, I said, it’s time to go back. I need to get a real job. So we went back to England and we ended up living in Cambridge for three years, which is a beautiful historic city. We got married in December of 1990, about just over a year after we’d met. It was a snow storm, which is three inches in England. So everybody who came to the wedding had to stay over, and then I was able-
Adam Williams (00:18:57): They stayed over for three inches.
Paul Andrews (00:18:59): Oh, you can’t travel in England with three inches of snow. The road closed down. Yeah, that was a big deal for Cambridge. But yeah, we had a great three years there, but it was time to come back. There’s an attitude and an opportunity that exists here, that doesn’t exist, and didn’t exist for me in England. So there was always a draw to be able to do more and be more and maybe make up for some of those father wounds by being in America where I had a fresh start, and I had advantages that I didn’t have in England.
There’s an attitude in England that it’s not cool to be good and get ahead. It’s tough. It’s working class. We’re not those people on the other side of the tracks. You don’t want to do that. Be happy with your trade. And so to be here… And it goes along with the open spaces and the immigrant attitude that founded this country just really resonated with me.
(00:20:14): It took something to, it took something inside of me that I think was nurtured by my parents that said, yeah, I can go to university. Yeah, I can get on a plane and go climbing in America. Yeah, I can go work for Arthur Andersen or work for Marriott International. I can do that because I’ve proved that I had that spirit, and that really resonated with what I see as the founding attitude here in America. It’s a country of immigrants.
This town in particular, in Buena Vista, it’s only been here, it’s been founded for 130, 140 years. Cambridge, where we lived for three years, the buildings are stamped 608, 814. The history there is amazing, whereas here, we’re so new and people are still open to that opportunity and that attitude and all of those things as well as just being in the mountains and the open space and the clean air. That really resonated with me, so it felt like somewhere that I wanted to be.
Adam Williams (00:21:31): You’ve mentioned father wounds a few times, and I’m curious, I know you talked about some of his story, but I’m wondering more specifically what it is you might be referring to in terms of, well, I guess are those wounds things that you feel? Is that hurt that you feel and you’re trying to heal? Or is it, if we go back to, well, my father didn’t get these opportunities and I have them, so I’m going to heal the wounds that he had? I want to understand that a little better.
Paul Andrews (00:21:58): Sure. For me, in my language, there’s often a shadow side or a negative to some positive attribute and driving. So it’s very easy to say that my dad loved me. He thought the world of me. He told me I could do whatever I wanted, and he encouraged me, and my mum, in her own way, to a similar extent too, and that’s beautiful because it gives me the self-confidence to be able to say, yes, I can. But what I’ve become more cognizant of in the last five, seven years, which is where I use that term wound, is that there’s some negatives to that too.
(00:22:45): I spent 32 years in corporate America working really hard to be better than, that wasn’t always good for my health. It certainly wasn’t always good for my marriage, and I was judging myself on doing not being. And so that’s the sort of shadow side to that relationship where I realized he was his own man. He made his own choices. I don’t have to make up for what he was not able to do and achieve because he didn’t have the same opportunities that I did, and it was okay to let that go. So that’s my wound terminology from that perspective, is that I can slow down and I don’t have to keep working 80 hours a week to prove that I can do what he didn’t do.
Adam Williams (00:23:44): Was some of that through your involvement with the Mankind Project, which I think that you participated in on some level, and if you can explain what that is maybe too, for anyone who’s not familiar with what the Mankind Project is?
Paul Andrews (00:23:57): Yeah, it’s a men’s group. It was started in the ’80s by some guys in Chicago who were pretty reflective. I think one or two of them may have been therapists, and they were very cognizant of the relationships that their wives had, they were supportive, they were open, they were vulnerable, and they realized that in all their male relationships, they didn’t get that support. And that it was super comfortable for guys to go out, have a beer, talk about work, talk about sports, talk about this, but to not really be able to talk about some of those underlying truths and concerns simply because society had never taught them how to do that. And so they started a group that’s evolved. It’s now a worldwide organization. I was introduced to it by a coach. My story of how I got into that was I was COO, CFO of a real estate investment company in Denver called Everwest. It was a beautiful career.
(00:25:19): For nine or 10 years, we’d grown this company from managing 500 million of assets to 5 billion of assets. We’d gone from 25 employees to 150 employees. We were in the process or just sold the company to Canada Life, which meant that we had more capital to grow it in the future, and we’d received some compensation for doing that. And so there I was, I was the COO of a real estate investment company in Denver, and my boys were all launched and happy and beautiful. I should have been incredibly happy, but I was mad at the other partners in the company about why can’t they be more like me? How do I change them to do this? Why can’t I control that? And it’s like one of those standing in the peat bog moments, it’s like, well, they don’t seem to be mad. Maybe it’s me. And so that was that light bulb and through that I-
Adam Williams (00:26:26): Yeah, that’s a revelatory sort of moment when we realize it might not be the world. It might not be everybody else. Maybe I need to look in the mirror. Right?
Paul Andrews (00:26:38): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:26:38): Did your wife help you to see that?
Paul Andrews (00:26:40): Oh, she’d seen it years before.
Adam Williams (00:26:42): I’m sure.
Paul Andrews (00:26:42): But I never listened to her. Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:26:47): Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Andrews (00:26:47): So it was a personal moment and I found a great guide. His name’s Brian Gast, and I spent some beautiful reflective times in his office, in his presence, learning from his wisdom. We did work around the Enneagrams, which really helped me see other people in those professional environments in a different way, and to show up in their lives in a different way that was way more productive. We did work around the archetypes and those driving subconscious forces that are often controlling a lot of our reactions and how we show up in life and to become more aware of that was just part of that work. And he introduced me to the Mankind Project. I went on an initiation weekend. It changed my life. Then since then, I sat in, we call them integration groups, I-group. So it’s a group of guys. We got together every week.
Adam Williams (00:27:53): What size group are we talking about? Maybe five or so?
Paul Andrews (00:27:55): About eight to 10. Eight to 10. And there’s some technology to how we interact. It’s not a help group. It is really holding space for other men in a way that helps them see who they are and to help them reflect on those deeper emotional pieces that I didn’t even know those were in me, let alone how to express them, let alone how to deal with them. And so to be in the presence of eight, 10 other brave men who could also be vulnerable and open and hold space like that, was a massive growth experience for me.
Adam Williams (00:28:53): Was it a process of building trust in that, for you to be willing to sit there with men, with strangers, with your feelings and kind of suss that out and be vulnerable and put these things out? And I’m going to guess that there is some real emotion that comes up from time to time with people in these things, otherwise it would seem like everybody’s holding back. So how do you enter that with the belief, this is a safe space? Men are not going to criticize me like they have, or I’ve been afraid they would my entire life because I was raised that way. I’m trying to picture this, and honestly, I’m probably slightly nervous just imagining myself in that situation because I don’t have any men that I interact with in that way. I would find it much easier to talk with women, obviously, especially my wife. I do this thing with the podcast. You and I are having this conversation, but we’re sort of talking about it. I’m not sure that we’re getting into the things that are going to really reveal ourselves to each other here.
Paul Andrews (00:29:54): And it’s not a great word, but I use the word technology, because there are processes that have been developed over the 40 odd years that Mankind Project’s been there that really help with that feeling of safety and accessing that vulnerability. But for me, it was really example, these were other guys who’d been doing this for 10 years, 20 years, and I could see them in touch with their inner drivers and their emotions in a way that… I first sat on that weekend… There’s an exercise you go through about feelings. It’s like, oh, that’s mad. Oh, that’s what’s sad feels like, and what’s bringing up that sad? And you see other guys peel that away and it’s like, oh, that’s grief.
Adam Williams (00:30:44): To be able to distinguish between what otherwise was just sort of a massive, yeah, whatever was sitting inside your chest or whatever at the moment.
Paul Andrews (00:30:53): And then to see other men go through that unveiling and those lights go on for them, so it’s a mutually safe place. And then to say, okay, that’s mad. I’ve never allowed myself to be mad before. And then that evolves to where is that in my body? Oh, look, I feel that grief way down here, or I feel that anger in my shoulders. And so there’s a process there that for me, helped me connect. And that led to some of this connection and unpacking with my dad and then unpacking my corporate stuff. And yeah, there were just different layers. For me, when I got in touch with those feelings and then where they were, you go to, where does that come from? And that goes to these archetypes that I mentioned, this lover archetype, your warrior, your magician that’s in touch with the magic in the universe that creates stuff.
(00:32:02): And then your king archetype that tries to bring all these things together that if you’re really a piece and in tune, you can instead of having these archetypal energies drive you in a subconscious way, if you can become more conscious of them, it helps. It helps me. We try and use I statements, be more present and in touch, and it was all through really example and feeling safe with the other men in these groups that helped me. And then you go from those archetypes to where’s that coming from? And there’s a lot of Jungian stuff that you get into. And this is me personally, where that journey took me and it’s like, oh, that’s not just that energy in me, there’s this unconscious that’s 90% of what’s driving me, and if I can turn that ego off a little bit.
(00:33:06): But then that gets into a collective unconscious, and you are more connected with not just the trees and the nature, which was always innate in me, but that goes back to my great-great-grandfather who made my dad safe, and I believe that will come through in my great-great-grandchildren too who will probably grow up in America, not small town, England.
Adam Williams (00:33:33): Do you ever get frustrated by having opened up this journey, this pathway where now you feel things more, now you’re thinking and reflecting on things more, that requires work? It requires getting into the nuance of the human experience and how you show up in your life, because you can’t go back. Once you’ve opened that door, there’s no closing it. Now you know that this is there. And for me personally, sometimes I’m like, I wish I was not sensitive or attuned or reflective. Sometimes I just want to be tough and have a wall against it all.
Paul Andrews (00:34:11): Yeah, no, I don’t get frustrated with Ed. It’s what I’ve been able to do. It’s been a gift for me in the last six or seven years, and it’s got me to a place where I’m living in the mountains and I can do a lot more biking in the morning, so hiking with the dogs in the afternoon instead of sitting in corporate meetings. But the frustration comes when I feel I’m trusting it too much and I’m going to woo woo and that surely this can’t be right. And what are you doing buying eight acres of land in a small mountain town that has no water? And just having faith that that’s going to work out.
(00:35:06): And rational mind kicks in and says, you need to put money in that bank account. You need to do something that’s rational. This doesn’t always work out from a numerical perspective. So that’s more of the challenge is it’s finding that middle way between that rational mind that knows numbers and knows proformas and know what a bank will lend you on versus this faith, that other piece that I’ve been describing. For me, that’s my faith. And there’s no proof of it. I can’t sit down there next to the river and actually have that tree talk back to me in words that I can record, but I can believe that we’re all connected.
Adam Williams (00:35:56): There’s something felt in it, something that we feel. There’s an intuitive sort of connection when we allow ourselves to be in that flow with what’s going on in the universe or whatever, versus we’re completely logic bound.
Paul Andrews (00:36:12): Correct.
Adam Williams (00:36:13): Which then tends to have us turned off to those pulses of life. We need that balance.
Paul Andrews (00:36:20): Flow is a great word for it, Adam. And yeah, when you get to that rational, when you turn on that, that’s where fear comes fro. It’s like, wow, I can’t do that. That makes no sense. So fear can really hold you back.
Adam Williams (00:36:33): The emotion, the emotional reaction of yeah, so much is driven by fear, right?
Paul Andrews (00:36:39): completely, look at our country today.
Adam Williams (00:36:43): As you are talking about this. I’m thinking about the debate right now that seems to be out there about masculinity and if we can look in society, we can look in politics, especially because it’s center stage in the hot white spotlight. Here is a form of masculinity that is about rage and fear and stoking hate. What you are talking about, what we are talking about-
Paul Andrews (00:37:04): It’s love.
Adam Williams (00:37:05): … is a form of masculinity that is rooted in compassion, and I will say a softness, but not in terms of weakness. To me, it’s much stronger when a person can look at themselves and not let ego and fear rule them, but instead… I can apologize. I can apologize to my kids. I can apologize to somebody who points out what I’ve done wrong. That is a strength because I’m not allowing my emotions and my fear to control me. That’s my perspective. But obviously we are having this national sort of struggle about, well, what does it really mean to be a man?
Paul Andrews (00:37:40): Sure. Yeah. What does it really mean to be a human being? I think it’s been going on for centuries. There’s been wars forever. But strength, if you really delve into that warrior archetype that, it’s fierce, it’s strong, it has boundaries, it tells the truth.
Adam Williams (00:38:03): It has character, morality.
Paul Andrews (00:38:05): It does what it promises, and that’s so different than dictating and belittling and better than, which is what you see today. It’s truthful, it’s not manipulative.
Adam Williams (00:38:21): You’ve mentioned this career more than 30 years involved in, well, I think you worked in a lot of areas, but real estate, development, investment, that was a pretty key area and it’s the specific area we want to get into in terms of your relationship to Chaffee County because of your venture of what you’re involved in now. There are a couple of threads I want to go here, and one is more of the general getting your insights related to housing affordability, what the challenges are, what potential solutions are, and then there’s also The Crossing, which is the development that you are leading, and what your vision is there, and how that hopefully can step into some of the void and provide some solution to these challenges. So I will let you choose how do you want to start or talk about this if it’s in the more general or if you prefer to go to The Crossing in the more specific first?
Paul Andrews (00:39:13): Yeah, I think it comes out of The Crossing and what we’re trying to do there, and thank you for taking me on that personal journey prior to this because that really sort of, for me on a personal basis, translates to how I got into this project and how it has evolved into where we’re currently at. Housing’s obviously a problem throughout the country, in Colorado and this valley in particular. Real estate prices for a whole bunch of reasons have escalated to a point where 90% of the people who live in this valley are unable to afford 90% of the homes that are here. So it’s not workable. It’s really only got to that level in the last five years. It’s going to have a major impact on this community as well as my kids and their kids. This change in overall house prices is going to impact our society in many different ways.
(00:40:27): For me, The Crossing is a piece of that solution. It’s a beautiful historic piece of land. There’s 16 acres of land between Crossmans Avenue on the north end of town that goes up to the Tractor Supply and Loves. And I was introduced to that land a little under three years ago by a couple of friends in town, and it was at the time that this corporate persona that I’ve talked about was dying off and I was sort of waking up and looking for something else to do, and this came along at exactly the right time. Even though I’d been the CFO and COO of real estate investment companies, I’d never done a hands-on development. I had no idea how to go through an entitlement process. I’d seen other people do it, but it was completely out of my league. I just felt drawn to that land.
(00:41:32): It has such amazing history. It was platted for 206 homes in 1892, 140, 130 years ago, and nobody had taken on this development for a whole bunch of different reasons. There’s this beautiful ice chute that goes right through the middle of the property where in 100 years ago, they were taking blocks of ice off of Ice Lake and shuttling them through the property to the train depot, which was right there where Napa is right now. And loading up the lettuce and the other vegetables that were grown in the valley and shipping them to Denver and to California.
It’s got pinion pines. It was the hunting ground of the Ute and the Arapaho. It’s got boulders that have tumbled out of these mountains over the millennia. So it has beautiful history. And so while I did not know much about development, my wife still asked me why I didn’t Google how to be a developer when this thing started. Once we did actually about a year ago. And I’m like, yeah, I have most of those traits, so I guess it might work out.
(00:42:55): But all I knew at that point in time was I wanted to really honor that land and to do the right thing. And those were the sort of guiding principles with nothing else to rely on, that as I build a team and spoke to other people that we relied upon. And it doesn’t take walking more than a spitting distance round here to realize that if you’re going to build homes, you really should be building affordable homes. And so what’s developed is a vision for a diverse neighborhood, and that can be an overused term, but for us, we want as diverse a group of homeowners to really call that their community as possible.
So it’s a diversity of income levels, it’s a diversity of ages, and when you say affordable or attainable, it can have negative connotations, but we’re talking about things that are affordable for teachers, for firefighters, for policemen, for everybody who’s lived here and has descended here for the last 120 years, and suddenly if we don’t do something about that, the kids are not going to be able to live here and-
Adam Williams (00:44:17): And certainly not go away and come back and be part of-
Paul Andrews (00:44:18): It’s impossible.
Adam Williams (00:44:21): … the future as adults because where’s the industry? Where’s the income and affordability?
Paul Andrews (00:44:25): Becomes a second home neighborhood. It’s like I have absolutely nothing but respect and awe for those who came before me. But what’s happened with these prices is that South Maine is 10% occupied on a full-time year-round basis. Even the farm, which was set out with a beautiful vision of affordability as those people, original people, sold, those prices are no longer attainable for people who live and work here. So that’s a 50%, 40% year-round neighborhood. The aspiration here is that this is a full-time year-round neighborhood and community where people-
Adam Williams (00:45:07): At The Crossing.
Paul Andrews (00:45:08): At the crossing, yes, that’s what we’re trying to achieve. And at its true aspiration, we’re at the crossing of the valley, we’re at the crossing of income levels, we’re at the crossing of ages. Can we aspire to also create a community that helps Buena Vista and Chaffee County, and this sounds arrogant, but at most aspirations do, work its way through this crossroads.
You have plenty of people who’ve lived here for 20 or 30 years or for seven generations who say, why change? Shut the doors. And then you have this wave that’s unstoppable of people who want a piece of what we’ve got. They want to live the dream. And with more work from home, more flexibility, more technology, they’re coming. And so what do we want this community to be? Do we want it to be a welcoming community that accepts that diversity and brings in new ideas and new talents?
(00:46:23): For me, I say yes. I think that change is inevitable and the plan and vision that we’re developing enables that change. It provides a place that’s affordable with 350 and $400,000 homes for real people who live and work here, at attainable prices, but it also provides a well-planned neighborhood with great green spaces, beautiful community interaction spaces, access to trails, views of the mountain where we can welcome people who want to join this community and contribute to this community and bring their vision, their talents, their treasure, their hero’s journey to enable them to follow their bliss into this community. And so what does that look like on a practical level? It’s a whole different range of house sizes, a range of lot sizes. We’re still building, I couldn’t even give you a picture of one of the houses we’re building yet. We’re close, Read’s Housing Trust houses will be out-
Adam Williams (00:47:38): Read McCulloch with Chaffee Housing Trust?
Paul Andrews (00:47:41): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:47:41): Yeah. So they’re a partner and so is the Chaffee Housing Authority, right?
Paul Andrews (00:47:45): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:47:47): I want to get to those in a minute. I want to step back here and see if you can help me with maybe a little bit of a definition of affordability. When we’re talking about housing affordability, I feel like that’s a phrase that across the country, it’s become so ubiquitous that I wonder if it ends up losing meaning and probably for a lot of people didn’t ever really have true meaning.
Affordability to me makes it sound relative. It’s, well, this house that you want to sell for a million dollars over there, that one over there is 800,000. I guess that’s more affordable. Well, I still can’t afford an $800,000 house, so I’ve got a problem. How do we put definition to what the circumstances are in Chaffee County when it comes to housing? You said 90% can’t afford 90% of what’s here. So how do we put some numbers and put some maybe more specific concrete perspective to where we are and what does it mean to get to be affordable? Because then we need to talk about how do we even get to that? How do you build it in an affordable way?
Paul Andrews (00:48:50): So it’s in the eyes of the beholder, right? But there’s a technical term that’s based around average median incomes. And to be affordable, if an individual is spending 30% of their pre-tax income on their housing cost, then that’s affordable. Here in Chaffee County, the average median income of an individual is about 65,000, and the average median income of a couple is about 85,000. If you do that math, then a rental apartment of $1,600 a month is affordable for somebody at a hundred percent of the average median income because somebody is going to double check this math and it’s not going to be quite right. But an average person earning 65,000 if they’re spending a third of their income on housing, can afford a 15, $1,600 rent. If you then work through a subsidized loan process, which is what we’re doing with the Chaffee Housing Trust, and we’re bringing grants to the table and state money to the table, then that same couple, let’s take a couple earning 85,000 can afford to buy a two bedroom house that costs 350 to 360,000.
(00:50:18): And so our goal is that 50% or 57 of the homes in the first phase of The Crossing will be affordable to those people. So that means a 33 unit apartment building that will be owned and operated by that Chaffee Housing Authority, because they own and operate it, we’re able to access cheap state finance and in grants. And when you run all that through the math machine, you come up with one bedroom apartments that we should be able to rent for 15 or $1,600 a month. Now, in my opinion, we need a lot of thousand dollars rentals in this community for people who are working hourly wages for the people who are working at the prison. But the state’s definition of affordability is less than a hundred percent average median income. That translates to $1,600 of rent, or it translates to a two bedroom home at 350, 360, a three bedroom home at 400 or a little over as long as you have a good enough credit to qualify for an affordable loan.
(00:51:35): So those are the state definitions of affordability, which is what we have to play by because in order to have 50% of the homes affordable, we have to build smart, but the only way to do that is to access subsidized funds that are available from the state, which sort of comes back around to the journey that we’ve been on to get to that goal.
Adam Williams (00:52:07): A $400,000 home that is, did you say three bedroom?
Paul Andrews (00:52:10): Three beds, yep.
Adam Williams (00:52:11): That almost feels like a dream at this point.
Paul Andrews (00:52:15): It’s less than half of what market rate houses are flipping for.
Adam Williams (00:52:19): There is a new build, just a single home at the end of my street that is 1.2 and a quarter million, that’s a three bedroom home, and couple thousand square feet maybe.
Paul Andrews (00:52:34): All the new three bed houses up on Arkansas are a million, two, a million, three.
Adam Williams (00:52:40): The gap between that market rate and what you’re saying to be able to put forward a three bedroom home at $400,000, it takes my breath away because unfortunately it seems like that’s territory we left a long time ago.
Paul Andrews (00:52:55): So that’s where, if we can execute on this plan that we’ve dreamt up and the partnerships that we’ve put together, that’s what we will be delivering in a year’s time. And I’ll be standing out there weeping with Read when people move in.
Adam Williams (00:53:11): Yeah, for sure. And a lot of people will be, those who will be grateful to you for the opportunities. For sure.
Paul Andrews (00:53:18): The real magic is then generating a truly diverse neighborhood, because there’s going to be $700,000 houses next door. There’s going to be $1.3 million custom houses out on the west side near Teel Run. But if we can create that diverse community where your rich grandparents can retire in from Brackenridge and build their dream home in the same community and share the mailbox with the nurse from the hospital in Slidell and one of Dean’s police officers, then you’re really weeping.
Adam Williams (00:54:00): You mentioned the grants from the state.
Paul Andrews (00:54:04): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:54:05): Because one of the key questions I have that I think might be good for us to get clear for listeners and understand some of the difference, there are different models for approaching this affordability issue. And I want to make sure we understand what is different about what you are doing, because otherwise, if I look at this just face value, you’re saying 50% are going to be affordable. You’re laying out these numbers. An obvious question to me then becomes, well, are the market rate houses that are going to be built, are they somehow subsidizing, like with an inclusionary housing policy where those rates are going to go higher in order to afford somebody paying less? Is that part of this mix or how is your model going to solve this?
Paul Andrews (00:54:46): Yeah, the market rate houses are going to be market rate, and so the market will drive the price of those. Ultimately, I’m not a large corporate developer with profit commitments out there to Wall Street or third party investors, so I don’t have to move as quickly as those investors, but at the same point in time, whatever retirement funds I took from corporate America, I invested in this land, and so I have to get my money back with some sort of return, otherwise I won’t be able to live here too.
(00:55:24): The way we did it, how did we get to that point? It’s just the evolution of that next part of that story, Adam. All we knew going in was that we were going to honor the land and do the right thing. Doing the right thing meant building a number of affordable houses to the best extent possible. We came up to some massive sleepless nights early in the process, interest rates went from 3% to 8% in the first six months that I own this land. The town worked out that it was out of water and there were only 300 water rights left and none of them were allocated to our land. So we’re looking at-
Adam Williams (00:56:10): These were significant obstacles.
Paul Andrews (00:56:11): Yeah. Significant obstacles. So you breathe. That’s when I go back to, rational mind kicks in and says, what were you thinking following your bliss to Buena Vista? And then things started to happen, and one of the first of those was just believing and reaching out. My wife was like, “Well, there’s this new urbanist thing. Looks cool. Let’s design the neighborhood around that.” And we found these amazing land planners in Boulder who still to this day, I find things that they designed in the neighborhood that I’m like, whoa, you guys are just so smart. And then my wife’s girlfriend, they’re talking about this and she’s like, “Oh yeah, I do branding and marketing and visioning for real estate projects.” And so around that dining room table, we come up with the name, the logo. And then it got really good, Jared Polis decided in his last term in office, he wanted to do something meaningful to address the housing problem, and the voters of Colorado passed something called Proposition 123.
(00:57:27): So that alone provides over $300 million a year. They redirected a lot of the infrastructure money and the excess COVID funds into one-time grants and cheap debt. And so suddenly these monies are out there. And then I find Read, Read McCulloch, who you spoke to a few months ago, has been working this thing for 15 years in the valley, and not only has he created 20 affordable or 30 affordable homes, but he’s created a network around the country and he puts on a conference for housing trusts here in the valley. And so he invited me to the housing trust conference where you really work out what’s a land trust. And a land trust is a beautiful legal structure that enables these houses to be more affordable. But what I found out there was that it’s also got this amazing history that goes back over a hundred years to disenfranchise people originally in the South and now a lot of communities in New York and New Jersey where people couldn’t afford to own their land.
(00:58:45): And this land trust structure has this beautiful history of how against all the odds, disenfranchised communities can own that land and have a stake in the future. And so that land trust model is what’s going to enable us to not only make these houses affordable today, but to fill the gap that we were unable to fill at the farm, which is to make sure that those houses are affordable in perpetuity. And so the first person in doesn’t just make a two or $300,000 windfall when they sell it, they get to keep a little bit of the appreciation, but it stays affordable. But I’m at this housing conference and there’s this guy from New Jersey or New York who’s been in this land trust business forever, and I’m suddenly working out what it is, and it’s more than just a legal structure. It’s a way for disenfranchised communities to own the land and to have a stake in the future.
(00:59:49): I’ve been to a whole number of different real estate conferences, and they’re normally corporate and buttoned down with a bunch of folk and ties, and I’m there in my jeans and T-shirt and listening to this righteous guy explain the history of the land trust model, I’m just weeping. And it was one of those peat bog moments where I’m like, okay, Read, how many of these can we possibly do? This is what we need to do at the cross and let’s make it happen. Also, another gift, a friend, one of my son’s best friends in high school, his dad, he and I knew each other a long time ago, and we’d done a bunch of hiking. I get a call the Friday before this conference. It’s like, “Hey, Paul, it’s Michael.” I’m like, “Hey, what up?” And he’s like, “Is this your name on an affordable housing conference?”
(01:00:41): And I’m like, “Sure, that’s me. I live up here.” And he’s like, “Wow, I’ve spent 30 years in the affordable housing industry, and I retired last year and I’m trying to get back in. And so I’m trying to learn about land trust.” So I’m like, “Come on, come up, stay and we’ll go.” And so suddenly we walk into this room where the senior people from the Colorado Housing Finance Department of Local Affairs, all these organizations that I’d never heard of, who suddenly have had their budgets taken from 10 million a year to 150 million a year, and they’re trying to work out how to provide this money to projects like ours. Michael suddenly appears in my life, and we walk in and he’s like the godfather of this affordable housing industry, and the people who, like, “Michael, what are you doing?” And he’s like, “I’m here trying to work out what you guys are all up to.”
And by day two of meeting with these people, he’s like, “Oh, I’m here to raise funds for our project called The Crossing.” And so by having that act of faith and so many things aligning, we were able to access $2 million of state grants, $3 million of subsidized debt, and suddenly this $5 million infrastructure bill, which is why nobody’s built a house out on The Crossing for 130 years, was affordable and attainable. And today we have 20 awesome folk out there with massive Tonka toys, digging trenches and putting in water mains and clearing streets.
Adam Williams (01:02:27): Is this a one-off sort of success, all of these things coming together and aligning for this one project, or do you see this as something that could be replicable elsewhere as, “Hey everybody, we have figured out a way to solve some of this housing crisis in other places as well”?
Paul Andrews (01:02:45): Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:02:47): Or am I just getting you too far down the road?
Paul Andrews (01:02:48): No, no, no. First it’s not a success. All we’ve done is dug up some boulders.
Adam Williams (01:02:52): Okay.
Paul Andrews (01:02:53): We got a long way to go. So I always have to-
Adam Williams (01:02:55): You’re trying to level set expectations.
Paul Andrews (01:02:58): … got to pinch myself and also not get ahead. It’s replicable to a certain extent, but even today, we are now fighting for funds to build the apartment building. It’s going to be $11 million, and it only achieves, in spite of the $5 million that we’ve obtained from the state so far, because of our vision, we need to go raise another $10 million. And access in those funds is very competitive. Even though 300 million sounds like a lot of money, when you divvy it out between all the needs, it’s not. And so it’s very competitive. The state is still working out the rules around it, and so it’s very fluid about what you can apply for and what you can’t apply for. And so from that perspective, it’s not replicable. Have we developed relationships with some of the best contractors in the valley and developed a reputation with these state funding agencies that we will do the right thing and we will be a great fiduciary for the funds with which we’ve entrusted them and have we built relationships? Absolutely.
(01:04:10): So in a certain way, there are pieces of it that’s replicable, but I speak to a lot of people about their project and the piece of land that they have that can they do this with. And most of the time it’s no, because that land that we’re trying to honor is incredibly unique. You don’t find 16 acres that’s appropriately entitled within town limits. It doesn’t really come up. Most of the projects that people are looking at for affordable housing require annexation. They don’t have the infrastructure for the sewer and the water, and it just gets way more complicated how this thing sat there for that long.
Adam Williams (01:05:03): I think it sounds complicated anyway.
Paul Andrews (01:05:04): It’s very, yeah. So rational brain has to do a lot of things. We have to tell this incredibly compelling story, is the relationship that we’re developing with the housing trust through a ground lease, and it’s very complicated, but that’s my trade. That’s like asking a carpenter whether he can build you a window frame or a door or ask a mechanic if he can fix your car before it has all these computers in it. My trade is putting together those financings and seeing how the pieces can pit together and building and motivating a team of experts to go after that goal. So that piece is sort of second nature to me. The, how do you say all come together and can you really create this beautiful, diverse community? That’s the magic that we all have to believe in, that doesn’t exist today.
Adam Williams (01:06:05): There’s a long-term vision and commitment here.
Paul Andrews (01:06:09): Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:06:09): It sounds like you are, I mean, you’re a couple of years at least into this process already. And right now you have those Tonka toys out there digging holes and pulling up boulders and whatever. It seems like you aren’t able at this point, based on what you’ve already said, to predict how long before those first units are built and ready for people to move in.
Paul Andrews (01:06:30): Yeah, I feel pretty confident. We have all the capital. It’s all about capital at the end of the day, and it’s all about the cost of that capital. If I’m borrowing money for the apartments at 7% and I own them myself, it’s $2,500 rents. If the housing authority owns this project and we access 2.5% debt, which is what I believe we’re going to do, then you get $1,500 rents. And so the capital is in place to build the houses. The first 12 houses for the housing trust, we are finalizing the design and plan for those and we’ll be submitting them to the town around the end of the year. We are working with various different contractors to price that out, so there’s a clear pathway there to get in the housing trust houses build, buy and delivered by the end of next year.
(01:07:28): And so if there are people listening who think that one of those houses would be appealing for them and they want to know if they qualify, I encourage them to, they can reach out to me via our website, but it would be much more productive to reach out to the Chaffee Housing Trust, who will help them start that journey to qualify to own one of those houses. The apartments, which will come on next, we’re right in the middle of this competitive capital raising process and we’re being creative, we’re being determined, and we’ve got a plan that we’re working on. We’ll know early next year if that plan comes together. If we’re successful, we’ll have 33 affordable apartment units built right next to a beautiful green space with unobstructed views down the valley by early 2026.
(01:08:22): The market rate houses, we’ve got a really cool team that we’ve just put together over the last couple of months that I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of, and we’re in the design phase for those. But we will be launching a pre-sale round for those houses next spring. March or April, we’ll be putting out designs and pricing and for people who are interested with those houses can probably get delivered by early ’26 too. So there’s a lot of pieces that are coming together, but there’s nobody living over there yet.
Adam Williams (01:08:59): So we’re talking about the complications of this, but I got to be honest, it feels like I’m more stressed about what that might look like, whereas you seem to be at peace with, “This is the process and I’m comfortable here. I know how this works. We’re going to make it happen.” You’ve even used the phrase, the zen of development. I’m sort of curious what that refers to because I think of red tape and you’re having to deal with government agencies, you’re having to deal with whatever all the permitting and the financing and banks, and I don’t even know what all the moving parts are. It sounds overwhelming to me. What is zen about development for you?
Paul Andrews (01:09:36): Yeah, it’s the faith. It’s the trust that I’m doing the right thing, and if I continue to do the right thing and the universe delivered me all of the people who’ve shown up in the last year and a half that have made this a reality, and I keep following that true north, then it will continue to deliver. And if we don’t get this loan that we’re looking at to make the apartments a reality next year, then that’s okay. Someone was meant to steal every piece of my backpacking and climbing gear in Boulder Canyon, otherwise I would’ve never met my wife and I wouldn’t have three amazing boys.
Adam Williams (01:10:30): That’s such an incredible story and perspective. I love that you just tied us back to that. This way of living and way of viewing things is to have that flow. To have flow and allowance, to allow life to unfold. We have to take action at some point, but it’s identifying those moments and seeing where do I step in and connect those dots and otherwise, again, hands off, let it flow.
Paul Andrews (01:10:56): Let it flow. And that’s the hard part, you said, where’s the stress? And do you really have to feel like you’re being a good man every day? No, the hard thing is having faith, for me. And then not just having so much faith because these things don’t just show up to you when you’re sitting on the couch. The money and Michael and Jen and all the gifts that have been a part of this project only show up for me if I put myself out there as I was. And the reason you may pick up some sense of confidence or so, “Hey, this guy has a plan,” is because it’s just relative to where I was two years ago where I had a piece of dirt, no fricking idea, no money, no water, 8% interest rates. And so to be at a point where we’ve actually cracked the first hurdle, which is to get through the entitlement process and to capitalize the first phase of the project, I’m in a relatively better place.
(01:12:02): But it also takes me… There’s this really cool little movie called Finding Joe, and I first saw it about 10 years ago around the time my kids were in high school or going to college, and it’s the heroes journey. It’s Joseph Campbell. It’s about mythology, but it’s not just the basic version of this, of like, you’ve got the descent where you are having your sleepless nights over no water, and then you come back and you challenge your way through it. It really goes deeper than that and says there needs to be, as part of that descent there’s a death. And as I’ve had the chance to reflect over the last few months and put some of this stuff in perspective, because it is coming together at this point in time. There was a true death of that corporate-
Adam Williams (01:12:02): An ego death.
Paul Andrews (01:13:02): … persona. Yeah. That always wanted to be right and wanted to tell his boss at work what to do because I knew more. That’s no way to live. And so in order to have more of that faith, but if you can’t get to that, and it just takes so much trust, and if there’s one thing, this is a health show at the end of the day, and the core of my health is having that faith to slow down and a lot of the men’s work that we touched on, if you can get in touch with those forces that are driving you, it’s so fundamental and underlying that to be able to breathe into that space. I can’t meditate for cheese, man, but I’ve been on a couple of retreats and I can see where people get to, and you sort of got to have that faith around the process and breathe into the planning department and the town’s external engineer who’s just driven by ego to slow you down and cost you more money and say, that’s him, not me, and we’re going to work our way through that.
Adam Williams (01:14:24): Well, you mentioned you not being able to meditate, but one of the key components of meditation is to gain awareness and to be able to step back, relax, allow room for these other things in life to happen, and then have a more conscious response, and that in that men’s work and with the Mankind Project that you were talking about, those are things that you learned there.
Paul Andrews (01:14:46): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (01:14:46): You learned awareness about, oh, this emotion feels like this or this feeling I’m having, this is how I can apply that and understand it. You were gaining awareness.
Paul Andrews (01:14:55): Thank you, Adam. Yeah, that’s meditative practice, and I get to do that four or five mornings a week as I watch the sunrise here. For 30 years I never had breakfast at home. I would get up with the alarm and I’d be first in the office and I’d have breakfast there, and I was going and solving my dad’s stuff from, not consciously from the beginning. So to be able to have that hour in the morning with a book and yeah, try reading Pima Children at 6:30 in the morning, that’ll teach you to be fearless.
Adam Williams (01:15:35): Were you reading any books prior, like say business books or success books, these ambitious thing-
Paul Andrews (01:15:35): I didn’t have time.
Adam Williams (01:15:40): Right, you didn’t even take the time for it.
Paul Andrews (01:15:41): Climbing books.
Adam Williams (01:15:42): Okay.
Paul Andrews (01:15:42): Yeah, hiking books. What’s the guidebook to climb all the centennials in Colorado? That was part of the go go go piece. I was trying to get close to nature.
Adam Williams (01:15:57): Ambition even in nature at that point.
Paul Andrews (01:15:59): Yeah, it was a list. Everybody’s heard of the 14ers. If you add in the next 47, you get the centennials, which is the highest 100 peaks in Colorado. I climbed them all in three and a half years. I did the last one on my 50th birthday.
Adam Williams (01:16:17): Well, that’s great. I’m coming up to 50 before long.
Paul Andrews (01:16:20): There you go.
Adam Williams (01:16:20): So I can appreciate that one, but that’s such tremendous drive to say, I’m going to bag all these peaks and in such a short period. I assume you planned where ultimately, as you were approaching, you’re like, “Hey, I can nail this last one on my 50th.”
Paul Andrews (01:16:35): Couple years out I’m like, “This is happening on my 50th.”
Adam Williams (01:16:35): Yeah.
Paul Andrews (01:16:39): But it was beautiful. It was amazing. I had transformative moments, but it was for me. It’s not particularly great for your marriage to spend-
Adam Williams (01:16:52): Took you away from your kids.
Paul Andrews (01:16:54): My kids were gone. This was one of the beautiful thing… Vaughan was born when I was 23. I had three kids at the age of 26. We don’t hang around. Okay, we’re getting married in four days, we’re moving to America. We’re having three kids in two and a half years. We can move to Colorado because that’s where we want to go. So we made things happen.
Adam Williams (01:17:23): Coming from small town England, coming from Woodley where nobody else around you is like, “Oh, I’m going to university. I’m going to America. I’m going to be a COO and an executive leading such and such company. I’m going to lead it.” You’ve been extraordinary your whole life from that point on.
Paul Andrews (01:17:44): But it doesn’t always bring you happiness, right?
Adam Williams (01:17:47): Yeah.
Paul Andrews (01:17:48): Yeah. It’s very easy and glib and I’d say, “Hey, money doesn’t just bring you happiness and peace.” And I experienced beautiful transformative moments on those peaks as I was climbing those hundred centennials, but it didn’t necessarily bring me connection to my wife or to my community. It was about me, and whether you call it my ego or my dad on my shoulder saying, “Yeah, you can do this. I never had the chance to do this. Wow, you can… I got to climb those little hills in my children’s home and we went for those little hikes in the woods around the house, but you get to climb the highest a hundred peaks in Colorado. Wouldn’t that be great if you could do that?” Sure, dad, let’s go. Every weekend. Let’s do four this weekend. Oh, look, hey everybody. I climbed five centennials this weekend. Great, but then you still got to this point where I’m like, well, I’m mad at those guys. Is that just me?
Adam Williams (01:18:54): Mad at the guys you worked with?
Paul Andrews (01:18:55): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:18:57): You have this story or identity at that time where they’re probably saying, oh, he’s the mountain climbing guy. He’s the this, he’s the that. The things that made you feel proud and feel like, I’m really doing it, dad. Where are you now? Let’s wrap with that. Where are you now overall in terms of this journey and how you see yourself? What is that story? What do they think of you now? Who you are?
Paul Andrews (01:19:23): Yeah. It’s the guy who’s doing what he’s meant to be doing in the place where he is meant to be doing it. That he’s grateful for the opportunity. He’s grateful for the guides and the mentors who’ve helped him get to this point, and he’s thrilled and excited that he gets to do this for another 30 or 40 years. It’s not like, “Oh, it’s a job. I can put it down and retire.” It’s like, I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing and that feels good.
Adam Williams (01:20:08): Thanks, Paul.
Paul Andrews (01:20:08): Thank you, Adam. And thank you for… We talk about following our bliss, and as I was thinking through that, I know I’m so inspired by everybody you interview and I’m inspired every day by people I meet in this town and this county, and it started occurring to me. It’s not just because they’re entrepreneurial and smart, it’s because they’ve made similar decisions to what you and I have made to do what feels right and not just do the safe thing with that big company and that safe health insurance in another city where it’s sometimes a lot easier to do that stuff. So thank you for bringing those people into our lives and thank you for everything you do for Chaffee County and our community.
Adam Williams (01:20:56): I appreciate that. I do love doing this.
Paul Andrews (01:20:59): You’re an inspiration, man.
Adam Williams (01:21:01): And I feel that way about everybody who sits here with me.
Paul Andrews (01:21:03): Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:21:04): Like you. So thank you very much. This has been wonderful, Paul.
Paul Andrews (01:21:07): Thank you, Adam.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (01:21:15): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you, and if so, you can learn more in this episode show notes at wearechaffeepod.com.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado, who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearechaffeepod.com. I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you’re telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(01:21:51): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, Host, Producer, and Photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, and to Andrea Carlstrom, Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
(01:22:10): You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram at wearechaffeepod. You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearechaffee.org. Till the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories. make change.”
[Outro music, horns and guitar instrumental]
